28 Creative PowerPoint and Keynote Presentation Designs

There’s a certain art to putting together a solid presentation and PowerPoint and Keynote are the primary tools of the trade. The “art” comes into play when you’re trying to set yourself apart; so how you use the tools is of great importance. Often it is the design of the presentation itself that does the trick. In an effort to help you put together a great-looking presentation, here are 28 examples of creative presentation designs using Powerpoint and Keynote:

Mike Vardy an editor on Work Awesome.
We could tell you where his personal productivity parody site, Eventualism and all of his other projects reside on the web, but you'd be best served going to Vardy.me and following the trail of virtual bread crumbs from there.

Also, I will be stealing some ideas from your slides… hehe… if you don’t mind 🙂

cheers!

Camélia on the 26th April

Hi Jesse, I’m intersting for your presentations, thanks for you.
So, I need ideas about my futur presentation with powerpoint. The topic is : Periruban landscape, I want do its graphic like the 3D films cinema. I hope do the original one. Can you help me?

Really cool and creative presentations. I usually buy templates for powerpoint at place like http://www.presentationfuel.com or slideshoping.com and them customize them – these are much more creative!!!

Okay, so I am going to stand up and say I disagree. I have put my full name on this post so you can contact me directly (please, no death threats) but I think its important someone make some key points about this compilation.

A few key points before you start slamming me however. Firstly, I am REALLY committed to seeing presentation standards improve and I acknowledge this attempt at doing so. Secondly, I am not criticising the creativity and design elements included here…some of them are truly spectacular…but i am challenging the notion that they are killer slide decks. Thirdly I have been through many but not all of them. Fourthly, my business is about creating presentations (thats all we do) so I have the hands on experience to make these points. Finally, I am giving really shortened explanations of the issues that could take much longer than the space here to explain. I ask you to take what i say as the startiing point to ask “what makes a good presentation”…my aim is to add to the conversation here, not criticise whats on display.

So they are:

1. Nice looking slides dont necessarily make killer presentations, they can be badly designed slides from a presentation context.

2. A series of image slides, with which either dont make or communicate a key point on each slide does not make it a killer slide deck. Every slide must do one or the other of of those things. If I cant see the point of a slide, probably neither can athe audience, so therefore its a distraction not a contribution. (Key question here: why do you create a slide? Then, what rules guide you in what you put on it?)

3. Many of these decks are just a series if slides, one after the other, many having no visual consistency. Killer slide decks have a visual narrative that flows smoothly from one slide to the next, just like a verbal narrative. If you told a story verbally that was a disjointed verbally as some of the these decks are visually, would anyone be able to follow it? Why is visual different? Make a presentation where people cant even tell where one slide stops and another starts.

4. Prezi, keynote, powerpoint…if you think changing the software will make a difference you are looking in the wrong place. The only difference prezi makes is it makes people “motion sick by prezi” rather than “death by powerpoint” or “killed by keynote”.

5. Some are incedibly text heavy. These have been designed to be read, not presented, so they are documents not slide decks. As teh later they work but nit the former.

I could write much more but for the sake of allowing other poeple to make a contribution to this discussion I will leave it at that. As previously stated, my aim is to have you, as designers, distinguish between what works in a presentation and how that is a different environment than print or other media.

Al on the 21st August

Yep. Reread the above.

Tom on the 6th December

It’s absolutely true there is a difference between effective presentation and amazing design, but the two are not exclusive. One can craft a great design template but not get the message across rendering it ineffective or present the information well but leave the viewer visually unimpressed.

In working with clients, crafting a deck is always tricky in a deliverable context as the client is both being presented to and given the deck for their own use. This usually requires a balanced mix between text heavy and lower content heavy slides.

The notion of a slide deck today isn’t what it used to be. It’s not always an in person interaction and they have to be able to speak for themselves. Many of these presentations weren’t in a business context, so following the same presentation principles of delivering a message on each slide doesn’t always apply. Slides are no longer shared with just the intended audience, they are shared socially to interested audiences around the world and creative template designs with heavier text help get that message across when no one is there to tell the story.